JANE AUSTEN READING GROUP

Princeton NJ

03 October, 2022

Description

Virginia Woolf thought Jane Austen (1775-1817) was the hardest of all great writers to catch in the act of being great. But why not try? This guided reading group will meet every other week, allowing plenty of time to read and respond to Jane Austen’s six published novels generally. But it will also aim to answer four questions. First, what exactly did Jane Austen do that was so great? What makes many of us want to read and reread her novels—and even discuss her novels, as in this group? Second, how did Austen do whatever it was she did? What literary techniques contribute to her greatness? Third, why did Austen do what she did? How did she hope her novels would influence at least their earliest readers? And, finally, why now? Why should Austen's literary techniques and moral lessons still matter today? Novels are nowadays seen as “multi-voiced.” In particular, they interweave their characters' distinct voices, in quoted speech and thought, with the narrator's voice and occasionally—but in Austen's novels often—with the voice of an “author,” who acknowledges that we are reading what Austen playfully called "only a novel." In this reading group, we will approach Austen's six published novels partly by means of these different voices and the kinds of sentences that reflect them, one kind of sentence—that is, one literary technique—per novel. And we will explore each novel's moral lessons. We can easily say what we "know" about human psychology and society that Austen didn't. But did Austen know theories about how fiction influences readers that we no longer recall? Sir Philip Sidney argued in his 1595 Defense of Poesie, an argument Austen clearly knew, that the delight we take in imaginative literature means we actually read it and thus assimilate its moral precepts and the examples—good or bad—of its characters. We confirm Sidney's argument when we read and reread Austen. Exploring Austen's moral goals as well as her literary techniques will demonstrate where Austen's greatness lies and will encourage group members to try more writers with serious moral or political goals. What do we learn from reading Austen? We learn to know ourselves and others better—and to become better readers of other great literature! I earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins with a dissertation on Austen and have taught literature at several universities. My book, Should You Read Shakespeare?, included a chapter on Austen, and I have published scholarly articles on writers from Austen and Samuel Richardson to William Carlos Williams and J. M. Coetzee. I am completing a second book on Jane Austen specifically. I have also published numerous newspaper opinion pieces, essays, and book reviews as well as a dozen short stories. And I teach creative writing to adults. Since we will discuss Austen’s writing techniques quite specifically, this reading group should interest fiction writers as well as Austen admirers.